Tesla's Autopilot Report
- jadedp413
- Apr 25, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 8, 2025
In March of 2025, a Youtuber named Mark Rober released a video testing Tesla's autopilot verses traditional Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors. This sparked a debate online between Tesla fans as they scanned the video frame by frame and saw that the autopilot was turned off as the vehicle crashed into a Wiley-Coyote style wall. This debate led me to look into Tesla's autopilot crashes to see if there were any discrepancies.
After realizing that there may be a system in place to try and prevent Tesla from being held liable for automotive fatalities by having it turn off when the system detects a crash, I began looking into Tesla crash history. Between the time that Tesla autopilot was released in 2015, the company verified that there have been 51 deaths in the US alone that were caused by the autopilot. However, in only 47 of those instances was autopilot claimed by the driver. This would mean that even though the driver is unaware of the system being on, that Tesla autopilot can be active. In 16 instances, the driver has claimed autopilot while Tesla has either denied or has ongoing court cases on.
These instances become more concerning when looking into Musk's claims about Tesla's safety. In 2018, Musk posted to his social media saying, "According to NHTSA, there was an automotive fatality every 86 M miles in 2017 (~40,000 deaths). Tesla was every 320 M miles. It’s not possible to be zero, but probability of fatality is much lower in a Tesla...". Musk is effectively operating off a smaller sample size which makes his safety numbers look much better by comparison. If we were to look at the latest reported crash data by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), we can see that Tesla fatalities have continued to grow every year since this claim. From 2018 to 2022, there were a reported total of 291 Tesla fatalities, with 134 of those fatalities coming in 2022. Excluding the outlier year of 2020, where people were confined to their homes during the pandemic, the rate of fatalities grew every year.
Musk also claimed on Twitter in November 2013 that the Model S "to date has the best safety record of any car on the road (no injuries or deaths ever)". Now to give some context, the Model S was released to the public in June of 2012, meaning that Musk was claiming a title with little to no sample size when compared to other vehicle brands. But his claim was also false as there had been reported fatalities in April and November of the same year. The likely source for Musk's claim would be the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), which tends to lag one to two years behind, leaving the only available data through 2011. Since 2013, the Model S has been involved in 93 total fatalities and makes up for 23% of the Tesla fatalities from 2018-2022.
With how the FARS data contradicts Musk's claims about Tesla's safety, it is no surprise that the system has been in Musk's crosshairs for awhile. In December 2024, Reuters reported on how the Trump Administration's transition team had plans to remove the crash reporting system. Along with these statements, Musk's "Department of Government Efficiency" began terminating workers at the NHTSA in April, through buyouts, layoffs and firings. Musk has pointed DOGE like a loaded gun at the government departments investigating his companies.
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